Things

In everything there’s a more-than-thing

staring at us as if saying: ‘It’s me’,

something that’s no longer there or was lost

prior to the thing, and that loss is the thing.

In certain high, absolute afternoons

when at last the world welcomes us

as if we too were the world,

our own absence is a thing.

Then the house awakens and the books imagine us

on the scale of their own loneliness.

Once we too had a name

but, if ever we heard it, we did not recognise it.